Flying in a plane is not only the fastest way to get to a destination, it's also the safest. Despite this fact, engine issues, bad weather, and even pilot errors can occur and lead to a plane crash. But even when these rarities occur, there are often survivors who make it off the plane alive.

These stories of plane crash survivors are proof that even when the odds are against people, they can still find a way to make it out of unimaginable circumstances. Chances are very high that most of us will never have to experience a plane crash, but there are plenty of people who have and have lived to tell the tale.

Cichan grew up to graduate with a degree in psychology in 2006, and in a 2013 interview with ABC News, she said the accident is something she thinks about every day.

"When I realized I was the only person to survive that plane crash, I was maybe in middle school, high school maybe," she said. "Being an adolescent and confused, so it was just extra stress for me. I remember feeling angry and survivor's guilt. Why didn't my brother survive? Why didn't anybody? Why me?"

According to what Carolyn told the website Chatelaine, she blacked out as the plane was falling and woke up later when she smelled fuel. She managed to drag herself to the door of the plane, and someone who witnessed the accident was able to carry her to safety. Her list of injuries was long — including broken ribs and teeth as well as jaw and head trauma — but she was able to eventually recover and return home to her family.

A flight attendant survived and tried to help fellow passengers when a plane crashed in 1985.

In 1985, Delta Flight 191 crashed when it landed in Dallas after getting caught in a storm, hitting a car and two water tanks when it made contact with the ground. Although 136 people were killed and another 27 were injured, flight attendant Wendy Robinson Fernsell survived. Fernsell was a last minute replacement for a co-worker who called in sick — but miraculously, she managed to survive the crash.

When the plane stopped moving, Wendy snapped into action, trying to help the passengers who remained. She climbed out of the plane and ran 75 yards away to safety. Eventually, she ended up returning to the wreckage in a police car, looking for her fellow crew members to find who else survived. Although Wendy did eventually find the courage to fly again, she is no longer a flight attendant and instead works as a high school French teacher at the same school one of her children attends.

A woman who was the sole survivor of a crash that killed her fiancé spent eight days in the Vietnamese jungle alone.

Annette Herfkins was 31 when she was on Vietnam Airlines Flight 474, which hit trees on the descent and crashed in 1992. She was the only one who survived— even her fiancé died in the crash. She had fractured hips, a collapsed lung, and her jaw was displaced, but still, she managed to climb out of the plane and used any source of water she could find to stay hydrated, meditating to pass the time. Eventually, she was rescued when a police officer found her out there.

"They showed me a passenger list from the flight and I pointed out my name," she said in her book "Turbulence: A True Story of Survival." "They had body bags with them, thinking that nobody could possibly have lived."

A journalist was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed the president of the Philippines in 1957.

The 1957 crash of an army plane into a mountain in Cebu, Philippines, killed the country's president, Ramon Magsaysay, as well as 25 other passengers and crew.

The sole survivor was journalist Nestor Mata, who had second- and third-degree burns all over his body. He was found on the side of a steep cliff. For 18 hours, rescuers took turns carrying Mata down the cliffside in a hammock.

"When a physician saw what I had just done, he remarked: 'You are newsman to the end,'" Mata told Philippines Free Press.

One woman survived by hanging onto the plane wreckage in the Indian Ocean for 13 hours.

French 14-year-old Bahia Bakari was the only person to survive the Yemenia Flight 626 crash in 2009 that is believed to have killed the other 152 people on board. To survive, she says she held onto plane wreckage for more than 13 hours before rescuers found her in the Indian Ocean.

Francis Mwamba, a Congolese journalist, had been returning from a reporting trip and said he remembered the plane shaking "violently" and then next thing he remembered was waking up in the hospital. He was the sole survivor of the crash.

The co-pilot who survived a 2006 crash that killed 49 passengers made sure to learn about everyone onboard.

The crash of Comair Flight 5191 had only one survivor — the co-pilot, Jim Polehinke. The crash killed 49 passengers at Lexington's Blue Grass Airport, according to WKYT. Polehinke sustained some serious injuries and later had one of his legs amputated. He was told he would never walk again.

"He kept that article with all the pictures of the people's faces and their profiles under his chair," his wife Ida told WKYT. "And he knows each person, their faces, and their names and what they did, where they were going."

A mother and her baby miraculously survived a horrific crash in 2015 and lived off the water in coconuts.

Maria Nelly Murillo and her child were rescued by the Colombian Air Force.
Luis Benavides/Ap Images

In 2015, 18-year-old Maria Nelly Murillo and her 1-year-old spent five days stranded in the jungle after the crash of a small Cessna plane — and the cause of the crash was unclear at the time. When the Colombian Air Force found the plane, at first, they thought no one had survived, but then they found Murillo and her son near the banks of a river, where they'd run to escape the fire on the plane, according to the BBC.

Murillo survived by drinking coconut water from coconuts the plane was carrying, as well as collecting rainwater. According to The Washington Post, she and her baby were both treated for burns, dehydration, and a broken ankle, but miraculously, her son was, for the most part, unharmed.

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